Mistakes we have made . . .

...gallery, has stopped designing water features unless they are supplied by rainwater. Sounds like a good idea to us! And with the chickens we did not want to provide habitat for raccoons. 2. Mixing Chicken Breeds Speaking of chickens, a friend of ours who grew up on a farm confirmed that “chickens are racists”. Like talk radio hosts, hens will pick on anyone who is different. In our case, our green egg laying and weird looking Araucana gets the cr...

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Growing Strawberries in a Self Irrigating Gutter (SIG).

...overflow pipe that drains to the street. The float valve is connected to a rainwater barrel. You can read more about how this barrel is constructed in one of our older posts. Since SIGs need to be watered even when it’s raining, this is a perfect use for a rain barrel. I will have to fill the barrel with municipal water during our dry season. Problems There’s a lot of plastic here, specifically PVC, which is an environmental and health disaster. I...

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Self-Irrigating Gutter Update

...barrel. Unfortunately the lower gutter leaked around 50 gallons of stored rainwater down into the garage below (our house is on a hill and the garage is at street level). To prevent this problem in the future I put a manual irrigation timer on the barrel so that if there is a leak, I won’t lose all the water at once. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEeCgGAbvwk If I were to do this project again, I’d also use a refinement that Larry Hall just poste...

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Decomposed Granite as Mulch: A very bad idea

...anite (DG) used as a mulch. Put some plastic landscape fabric down (blocks rainwater in our climate, fyi) and top that plastic with DG. They then punch some holes in the DG/plastic and pop in succulents and maybe a rosemary bush or two. By the time the yard becomes a sad, desertified tangle of unhappy succulents and crabgrass, the flippers are long gone. I’ve got a big issue with DG as mulch. In order for DG to look good, it’s got to be compacted...

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Saturday Linkages: Pallets, Ladybugs and Portlandia

...egs – Outstanding – IKEA Hackers http://po.st/a3Hn0G Jailed for collecting rainwater: http://theflyingtortoise.blogspot.com/2014/08/gary-harrington-aged-64-and-resident-of.html?spref=tw … [Update: A reader notes that there is more to this story than the headline indicates–looks like the person jailed may have been damming streams and taking water from his neighbors.] Little chicks wearing muffin wrappers as tutus! http://www.recyclart.org/2014/08/...

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